Can't go deeper at the moment but if you want to give a bit of arcade retro feeling to it when you start the game instead of immediate choice of difficult level, give a bit of "attract more" feeling: show the various item explaination like you do on the webpage, maybe the score chart with some default entries, and would be nice to see between those some short CPU gameplay of different levels, but this could be more difficult to implement.
Interresting comment !
I totally see what you mean.
The thing is that I have already optimised the code and syntax a lot to save some coding tokens and I currently have less than 300 tokens left out of 8192 as the pico8 limit so I'm not sure I'll be able to go very far in the direction you suggest.
But I agree with you that it would be a good improvement !!!
Thanks for the suggestion,
Cheers.